How volunteers count hundreds of people experiencing homelessness in Cumberland County each year 

“Who’s on Team Alpha?” Stacey Buckner called to the crowd milling about First Baptist Church’s gymnasium.

It’s a cold morning, and the gym isn’t much warmer. Leftover snow is being tracked onto the gym’s dark wooden floors. Many in the crowd, including Buckner, are still wearing their coats.

Despite the temperature and early hour, the room is abuzz with the greetings of Buckner and the other community volunteers gathering for this year’s Point-in-Time Count (PIT), an annual count of unhoused individuals in Cumberland County.

Many volunteers are those who work with the unhoused in some capacity like Buckner. She works primarily with veterans experiencing homelessness as founder and executive director of nonprofit Off-road Outreach. Others work for the City of Fayetteville or the Cumberland County Government. Some are leaders in faith organizations.

This year’s group of over 40 PIT Count volunteers spent 24 hours from Jan. 24 to Jan. 25 counting as many unhoused county residents as they could find, handing out care bags, asking survey questions and verifying the count’s initial data. The work is crucial to Cumberland County; without it, there would be fewer resources for its unhoused residents. 

Sara Reyes, an interpreter with the Cumberland County Dept. of Public Health, and Keishaun Johnson, with the City of Fayetteville’s Economic Community Development, were strangers at the start of their 8 a.m. PIT Count shift. Yet, the mission to serve the county’s homeless population bonded them as they worked the volunteer check-in table throughout the day.

“It takes every little thing to make the team and make the movement move,” Reyes told CityView.

The PIT Count

The PIT Count is run by the Fayetteville-Cumberland County Continuum of Care (CoC), a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-authorized homelessness case management organization. The CoC oversees the county’s Coordinated Entry program, a housing referral service that helps unhoused individuals find permanent housing. 

The PIT Count comprises two parts: the sheltered count, performed by homeless shelters like The Salvation Army, and the unsheltered count, conducted by volunteers assigned to various parts of the county to survey unhoused individuals. If a person experiencing homelessness declines to fill out the survey, a volunteer fills out an “observational” survey. 

“That observation survey gives us an opportunity to at least count that individual based on the physical situation that we have, writing down what location we saw them, what they looked like, what age we thought they might be, gender, race, et cetera, et cetera, so that at least we can capture data on an individual without them having to feel like they’re being required to go through a questionnaire survey,” Debbie Brown, chair of CoC’s board of directors, told CityView.

The surveying groups head out in shifts. One from 8 a.m. to noon, another from noon to 6 p.m., and a final group wraps up around 11 p.m. The sheltered count occurs in the evening when most unhoused residents are returning.

Besides those going out and surveying unhoused residents, two other volunteer groups are critical to making the PIT Count happen: those running the check-in table and reviewing the collected data. Check-in volunteers like Reyes and Johnson are responsible for gathering teams and handing them their assigned location and other paperwork. Data reviewers ensure the surveys were filled out properly and insert the data into CoC’s PIT Count database. This year, the volunteer data reviewers were led by Mario Hardy, a self-described community organizer. 

The work was personal and practical for Hardy. He said he was homeless for three years of his childhood and has worked with the local unhoused community for over a year; he knows what the needs of the community are and the funding required to meet them.

“The funding that’s really needed is federal and [the PIT Count] plays a part in determining that,” Hardy said.

The PIT Count results and data collected on homelessness services are utilized throughout the year and determine how much funding HUD gives Cumberland County to address homelessness. Brown said HUD uses the data to determine “gaps in service” where federal funding is most needed. Those services include anything necessary for someone to attain stable housing, from help getting employed to mental health care.

In 2024, the PIT Count found 374 unhoused people resided in Cumberland County.

The highest count of unhoused residents a PIT Count has ever produced was 475 in 2022. In 2023, that number was 388. Yet, between October 2022 and September 2023, Brown said CoC served 800 individuals, helping them access housing, food and social services.

“Even though it’s just a 24-hour snapshot, it still gives data to HUD for them to be able to use, to say, ‘Here’s the need in this community,’” Brown said. 

An eye-opener

Around noon, more than three hours after heading out with clipboards and boxes full of care packages, Buckner and the rest of the Team Alpha returned to First Baptist Church. In their chilled hands were around two dozen paper surveys from the unhoused residents willing to answer the PIT Count’s 25 questions.

Surveying unhoused residents was eye-opening for Team Alpha member Tania Thomas, who works with the Cumberland County Child Support Department.

“I didn’t realize there were that many [encampments] out here,” Thomas said.

Despite county and city no-camping ordinances, Brown said there are 17 known homeless encampments throughout the county. New ones are primarily popping up in Spring Lake.

“You drive past all these places all the time and you never know they’re people living in those conditions,” said Shanon Myers, the community growth manager for substance use treatment organization Better Life Partners and member of Team Alpha.

One of the larger encampments Team Alpha visited that Friday morning was near the Cape Fear River. It’s an area known for having encampments; the City of Fayetteville cleared one nearby almost a year ago.

Several of the encampment residents were living in one car, but it had been buried in the snow and mud for three days and they couldn’t get it out. Buckner took her Jeep, attached the car to its winch, and pulled it out. She said the group, initially reluctant to engage with her team, gladly filled out surveys after the rescue. 

“I got them out, pulled them out and got gas and aired up their tires, and they were good to go,” Buckner told CityView. “But, prior to that, they did not want to engage at all.”

Team Alpha’s members — all first-time PIT Count volunteers besides Buckner — said Buckner was crucial to encouraging survey participation since she’s familiar to many of the county’s unhoused residents.

Gaining the trust of people experiencing homelessness is one of the major challenges PIT Count volunteers face, explained Nina Phillips, who works for Spring Lake Family Support Services. She and her team made several trips to and from Spring Lake as part of the PIT count. Phillips said the team’s approach style, something each volunteer is trained on before the official PIT Count, was critical to gaining survey responses.

“People, they have their pride. They don’t want you coming up and just pointing out what is already there. It’s almost like throwing it in their face,” Phillips said. “We just came up [to Spring Lake] and we were friendly. No judgment at all, because any one of us could be in that situation at any point in time.”

One Spring Lake resident willing to chat was staying in a shed-like structure, which Phillips estimated was smaller than the size of a typical bathroom. 

“It hurt to see her in that condition,” Phillips recalled.

Witnessing people enduring such deplorable conditions takes a toll, Phillips said, but it’s necessary to advocate for better resources to serve people experiencing homelessness. 

“That’s reality,” Phillips told CityView. “There’s no sugarcoating it.” 

By participating in the PIT count, Phillips hopes to raise awareness about homelessness in Spring Lake and secure more resources for her organization and others helping the homeless population there. She said Spring Lake is often overlooked in discussions about homelessness in the county. 

“We’re trying to put Spring Lake on the map to let them know that there are homeless people here, too, in Spring Lake,” Phillips said. “Even though we’re a small, little town, a little city, they’re here, and don’t count us out.” 

Just a 24-hour snapshot

Brown estimates this year’s PIT count numbers won’t be officially announced until April. In the meantime, she and a team of ad-hoc committee members will further review and clean up this year’s count data. Once finalized, they’ll submit it to HUD for the department to give its final stamp of approval.

Even once the data is finalized, Brown emphasized that residents should not interpret the PIT count results as the literal number of homeless people in the county. The PIT Count includes residents living in vehicles, but it’s impossible to count those couch surfing or not out during the count, for example. Brown emphasized that some of those missing from the count could be residents who are working one or two jobs and still not able to afford shelter.

“We do a morning count, we do an afternoon count, we do an evening count, we do a shelter count — we do all of those,” Brown said. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re getting every individual that is homeless.”

Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.

CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.